Three days ago, design pioneer Airbnb announced the redesign of its search as "the biggest change in a decade" according to its designer-CEO Brian Chesky.
It's time to tell your teams: search is dead. Time of death: Summer 2022.
And Search 2.0 is here to stay.
But it has been a decade in the making, dating back to the introduction of Google Instant in 2010, the autocomplete "smart search" of its search engine. Since then, search has evolved from being character-specific input queries to full-blown navigation and discovery engines.
Now, technical feasibility and UX arguments for robust search patterns are supported by:
- Out-of-the-box plugins like Algolia and Amazon's OpenSearch
- Improved DOM rendering with JS frameworks like React and Vue
- Lessons learned from modern search practices: Apple's Spotlight, Facebook's Graph Search, Google's Instant, etc.
There is no excuse for designing stale search experiences in 2022. Use these next-gen patterns moving forward.
Next-gen Search Patterns
Pattern #1: Search as Discovery
Answers the question "Where should I go?"
Best for surfacing content in content-rich products like productivity tools, social media platforms, and e-commerce.
Anatomy:
- Recent search activity
- Recommendations based on personal activity
- Recommendations based on popular activity
- Recommendations based on new features
Pattern #2: Search as Advanced Filtering
Best for e-commerce shopping, searching through historical logs or completing tasks in data-dense productivity tools.
Anatomy:
- Recent search activity
- All filterable top-level categories
- Any filterable contextual-level categories
Pattern #3: Search as a Toolbar
Answers the question "How do I do ________?"
Best for products that involve a high volume of actions like productivity tools.
Anatomy:
- Keyboard shortcut indicators
- Recommended actions based on frequent activity
- All other available actions
